Rural-Adapted Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality developed the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture to measure hospital safety culture, which can be defined as the shared, learned beliefs and behaviors that reflect a hospital's willingness to learn from experience.﻿
The UNMC Patient Safety team developed a rural-adapted version of the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPS) for use in Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs). Since 2005, we have conducted the rural-adapted survey in 74 unique CAHs located in 13 different states. In 43 of these CAHs, we have conducted the survey multiple times providing the ability to assess the impact of patient safety interventions on safety culture over time. These adaptations allow us to accurately categorize approximately 97% of CAH respondents by department and position. The rural-specific adaptations are:

Collapse the department choices to reflect the CAH environment.

Collapse the staff position choices to reflect the CAH environment.

Accurately categorizing respondents is required to identify the variations in safety culture that exist in all organizations regardless of size. When CAHs use the original HSOPS, the majority of respondents choose "other" for department and/or position, which decreases the usefulness of survey results.

By contracting with the UNMC Patient Safety team to conduct the HSOPS or rural-adapted HSOPS, hospitals receive the following:

Option to conduct the survey using paper (mail) or electronic (email) method